Wednesday, February 22, 2012

a couple of handy image generator websites

i forgot about this one last week when mentioning the atheist bus slogan: There's probably no God. now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/
here's what i would've put up in response to Philippians 4.4-7

there's also a whole bunch of similar sign generators over at RedKid.net, like bumper stickers and alphabet soup!

Thursday, February 09, 2012

passive imperatives in Phil. 4

I'm trying to understand the difference in emphasis between the two passive imperatives in Philippians 4.5,6:

5 (τὸ ἐπιεικὲς ὑμῶν) γνωσθήτω πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις. [aorist]
6 (τὰ αἰτήματα ὑμῶν) γνωριζέσθω πρὸς τὸν θεόν. [present]

5 let (your gentleness) be known by all people
6 make (your requests) be known to God

they stand out in that they have essentially the same construction except for the verbal aspect.
now, the roots are fairly similar, and i don't know if you can make much of the difference between them (they both are from that gnosis word, knowledge).
so the difference then must be the aspect in the verbs.
but the difficulty comes in understanding the emphasis in a passive imperative.

with the aorist, the force might be toward a result, with a summary aorist; may people come to the knowledge of your gentleness.
with the present, it's about making God aware of something, namely, your requests; may God now know of your requests.

i think my question is to do with how do i get across the parallel construction and emphasis, which i think Paul had in mind, in a way that i and others can grasp hold of?

this is where i'm up to at the moment anyway.